Dim as an Ember
by Harpokrates
Summary: Fate is as Fate does. Optimus Primal and Dinobot talk philosophy.


Love me some foreshadowing for the events of a cartoon that ended 17 years ago. This is my entry for the Superstition square for the tfrarepair Fall 2016 bingo.

* * *

It was peculiar, seeing this new sky again every night. It made sense, given that the strange, primitive world on which they found themselves seemed to circularly orbit a star, but looking up and being able to recognize individual constellations was often a minor surprise to Optimus Primal. For a split second, the part of his mind that thought he was still on Cybertron panicked that the planetary engines had died, pulled them out of their irregular orbit, and that they were drifting aimlessly through space.

As far as he was aware, and as far as the records stated, Cybertron hadn't had a normal orbit since long before the war. The planet was able to sustain an eccentric orbit around a main sequence star—very luminous—with assistance from the engines embedded in the surface of the planet, and some of the finest minds in astronautical engineering.

 _Why_ Cybertron was unable to sustain a natural orbit was one of the most hotly debated topics in any room of scientists. Optimus had witnessed many a fight break out between otherwise timid theoreticians regarding the mystery of their planet's gravitational peculiarities. The leading scientific theory, and the one to which he ascribed, was that the density—specifically the lack thereof—of their honeycombed planet lent it some occult property in regards to its orbit.

It wasn't a perfect explanation, but it was better than some of the other tripe he had heard, which ranged anywhere from 'it's the will of Primus to wander freely' (fundamentalists desperately trying to make sense of scripture in an increasingly secular world) to 'Quintessons' (the conspiracy theorist's answer to everything) to 'a secret Decepticon council covertly running the planet under their globalist New World Order and orchestrating every governmental move' (conspiracy theorists who were considered outré even by other conspiracy theorists).

It wasn't in his nature to mock others, but he nodded along when Rattrap got bored of complaining about their new address and decided to start ragging on the old one.

Optimus shook his head and stepped off the lift. It was cloudless out, and both moons were barely slivers, staring down like some giant's lidded eyes. The stars glittered in the inky black. He wasn't often inclined to slow down and admire the beauty of the world around him—something that nearly had him failing the required art course at the Maximal Science Academy—but something about the contrast, about the nuclear spots of heat, lonely in the galaxy, set against a black canvas, reminded him of Cybertron at night. He had visited New Crystal City once, after his first assignment off-planet, with a head full of ideas and a pile of credits burning a hole through his subspace. Leaning out of his hotel room's window, staring into the endless black, made smokey by the hazy light burning from every building that could afford neonwork, it had felt like this, like there was an infinite number of worlds lurking just beyond the darkness. Only now, he could see them.

Only now, he was on one.

Even without the moons, the starlight managed to illuminate the the deck of the Axalon. The bulky silhouette Optimus has mistaken for a piece of the hull shifted, revealing a familiar form.

"Dinobot," he called out, and slowly meandered over on his knuckles, "I didn't know you were up here."

"Primal," Dinobot barely glanced over the strange, sloping shoulders of his beast mode. It was as much of a greeting as any. Optimus stood next to him and waited until it became clear Dinobot didn't mind—or at least that he didn't care—the company. He sat down on the hull and let his legs dangle over the empty air.

"Fullstasis get too exciting for you?"

"Mnh. Cheetor decreed the game 'totally lame', and attempted to coerce Rattrap into a more… _entertaining_ version."

"Oh?" Optimus waited for the punchline.

"Yes, I left when they started incorporating minor explosives."

Optimus cringed. Poor Rhinox.

"Well, at least it's quiet out tonight."

Dinobot grunted in agreement and returned to his silent brooding. Optimus shrugged, and looked upwards. Quiet wasn't exactly the word to describe it, but the only noises were organic ones: insects chirping, the distant yowls of some megafauna, the background rush of water. There weren't any Predacons, at least.

"Too bad we don't have any deep space sensors online," Optimus remarked. His voice sounded louder than it should have.

Dinobot swiveled a reptilian eye at him.

"We could tell what stars these are," Optimus explained, gesturing heavenward, "and use them to figure where we are." He paused, considered, "or when we are."

"Or both."

Optimus nodded. "Or both."

Dinobot frowned—as much as a velociraptor could frown—and looked back up at the moons.

"Have you ever considered," Dinobot grimaced, and spat the word like it was something foul, " _choice_ , Primal?"

"Choice?"

"Free will, perhaps," Dinobot gestured with a clawed hand, "whatever you want to call it."

"I can't say I've had much time recently to debate philosophy."

"Hmm," Dinobot sounded almost amused, "how curious."

"What?"

"I would have thought that a _Maximal_ of all beings, would put more thought into," Dinobot's face screwed up, " _free will_. After all, it was _your_ Optimus Prime that was so obsessed with it."

"Freedom is the right of all sentient beings."

"Yes, that."

Optimus drummed his fingers on the hull. "Free will, huh? Not exactly the same thing as choice, is it? It's not the same as freedom either."

"Hn."

Dinobot lapsed back into silence. The cold prickle of a shiver crept down Optimus' shoulders. Synth-flesh was more efficient than its designers had realized at radiating the excess heat transformers produced. In coming to this planet and taking on a beast mode, for the first time in his life, Optimus Primal experienced _cold_. It wasn't exactly a pleasant experience.

Dinobot scowled, drawing his pebbly skin back over his maw.

"Feh. 'Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.' Such a trite phrase."

"Trite?"

"Oh yes," Dinobot's tongue rattled in between his teeth—amusement, Optimus had realized—and he jabbed a claw towards Optimus. "The Prime offered freedom, true, but he demanded assimilation in return. Freedom with conditions is not _freedom_."

"I didn't know that refraining from war crimes was such a difficult request." Optimus said, "We've both read the histories, Dinobot."

He kept his tone as mild as he was able, but Dinobot still scoffed at him.

"See, _Maximal_. Describe for me your vision of a perfect society. Peaceable, good mechanisms with their morals and goodwill living neighborly? A Predacon spark is not a Maximal spark."

"And yet here you are. What does that say about free will?"

"Men, at some times are masters of their fate," Dinobot's voice took the odd, lilting pattern of a quotation, "the fault, dear Optimus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. Making a choice, or having the right to choose, which is more important?"

"I suppose it depends how often you exercise that right."

"Or how often it is threatened to be taken from you. The lack of something makes the desire for it all the stronger. Have you ever wondered why so many Predacons become outlaws?"

"Economics," Optimus shrugged, "lingering prejudice against the Decepticons. Lack of opportunities."

"You make it sound so clinical."

"Academic literature does that to everything."

"Hn." It was much of an answer as anything.

"When you say 'free will'," Optimus ventured, "what do you mean?"

Dinobot looked at him like he was stupid. "Choice, and lack thereof, Primal."

"Yes, I know _that_ , but, if your will isn't free—if it isn't _yours_ —then whose is it? Who controls your, ah, destiny?"

Dinobot was silent for a long moment, staring unblinking into the darkened forest far below them. Then, his nictitating membrane flickered over his eyes and his attention swiveled back to Optimus.

"Would you accept it if I said the machinations of others? What if I called it destiny? The Will of Primus?"

"I'm not religious."

"It doesn't matter." Dinobot paused and redirected his thoughts. "Are we aimless? Is that worse than being playthings of some grand cosmic being?"

"You're asking if we want," Optimus frowned, and chose a different phrase, "if we _need_ to be controlled."

"Perhaps not controlled. Perhaps guided."

"I never took you for a fatalist."

Dinobot glanced sidelong at him. "You're a commander, Primal, a captain. Haven't you ever wanted someone else to take responsibility for your actions?"

"Sometimes," Optimus shrugged, "I suppose it's easier to follow orders than to give them. But, _but_ don't think I'm agreeing with you, because I'm not."

"Of course not," Dinobot laughed, a dry, harsh, rasp of a noise. "Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own. That is fate. What do you see in the stars, Primal?"

Optimus leaned forwards to catch a glimpse of Dinobot's long face. "Are you drunk, Dinobot?"

Dinobot snorted. "No. How low of you to assume so."

"Then why the melancholy? I know you tend towards philosophy, but this is unusual, even for you."

"I have been dead, Optimus Primal."

Optimus paused, considered. "Recently?"

Dinobot snorted in amusement. "I am hardly so weak. You think someone _here_ could have killed me?"

The question was rhetorical, so Optimus didn't bother answering. However, he didn't miss how Dinobot neatly avoided the question. He was taciturn, and avoidant about everything regarding his past.

"No," he drew the word out, "I was dead. Once. I saw _nothing_."

"What were you looking for?"

Dinobot didn't answer the question. "I considered, Primal, that I had made a mistake. Perhaps I was seeing nothing because I had," he spat the word, " _failed_. It was far kinder than the alternative."

"The alternative being?"

"That there is nothing, and that we are aimless and adrift. I dreamed of Silicon Valhalla, longed for it once. For a long time, it was my… _purpose_. For that dream to be just that… I am prideful, Primal," he said, and his voice held a far off tinge of shame, "I understand that. And it hurts my pride to be proven so deeply wrong."

"Absence of proof isn't inherently proof of absence."

"Trite."

"But it _is_ true. I can't say I believe in these kinds of things, but until something is proven not to exist, then the possibility—however slim that possibility is—remains that it _can_ exist."

"Can and does are very different."

"Yes, I suppose they are."

Dinobot cackled again. This time it was a touch more unhinged, a touch more desperate. "Is this destiny, Primal? Here, on this mud planet? What a sorry story that would be."

"Yes," Optimus agreed, and smiled. He looked up at the dual moons. "It would, wouldn't it?"

* * *

Title from 'Once Upon a December' from the Don Bluth movie Anastasia.

One of my favorite things about Beast Wars was the time travel shenanigans. Technically, everything they do, they've already done. The moon was destroyed, the Nemesis flew and crashed, Optimus Prime's and Megatron's sparks were juggled around like flaming chainsaws, and yes, Dinobot and everyone else died before they existed.

The quotes (fairly easy to recognize, it's the stuff that doesn't sound silly) are from Hamlet and Julius Caesar.

Timeline wise this takes place early season one.


End file.
